Expatness

There is an incredible allure to being a traveler. Leaving home for a new country, abandoning the established and familiar for something foreign and unencountered, is both a challenge and a release. For the first time in life you become acutely aware of the things that balanced, trapped you, comforted you, and stifled you because they are all gone. It’s utterly terrifying and incredibly satisfying all at once. You dive into the new project of finding new comforts, new bad habits, new experiences, new annoyances, new obsessions, and, very likely, a newfound love of ways to inebriate yourself.

I’ve lived this way for four years. I love it… 99% of the time.

Some days, like today, you sit at a coffee shop alone while considering the speed at which people pass through your life and how transient relationships are when you do the expat thing. And then Facebook. Random messages to people you’ve not spoken to in months or a year. Suddenly their lives matter. A lot. You need them to share. You need to dip you hands into a pot of experiences that belong to someone you established relationship with some time ago because you crave stability! The new is so wonderful and infuriating. You’re ideas are perpetually being challenged and changing you and yet… fuck that today. Seriously. Fuck. That. Today you just want something old. You want something you’ve done a thousand times. You want something that tastes like bacon fat and cheese instead of kimchi and tom yam. Potatoes. Dear God, potatoes. You’re going to throw the rice and tofu out the window. Meh.

And your green tea latte goes down the hatch as you contemplate if you’ll ever find a stable partner in this country while taking that needed nightly break form the job at you love and skipping the yoga class you’re normally thrilled to be immersed in.